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A veteran Leica street shooter contacted me with
complaints about her new digital camera. She's an established
black and white shooter, using a Leica M6 with a wide angle lens
to shoot people unaware of the camera in their natural
surroundings.
Excited by her new digital acquisition, she took
to the streets after a scan of the "quick start" portion of the
user manual and shot in the Automatic mode.
Her complaint? "I'm just not getting the same
kind of shots that I do with my M6."
As the teens at the mall say, "Well, duh!" She
had just learned about the phenomenon of most digital cameras
called "exposure lag," non-existent in her conventional Leica.
My advice to her was to learn the manual exposure functions of
her digital camera through a thorough reading of the user manual
and try to emulate the techniques she uses with her Leica.
Drum Band in Edinburgh: Photo by Jim Patterson
Here are those suggestions, many of which will
apply to all digital cameras:
1) Turn off the flash. Since she shoots in
available light anyway, having the camera decide whether the
auto flash is needed adds to exposure lag.
2) Use manual focus and set the focus distance
to about 10 feet. With her Leica, she uses pre-set focus
distance, works to shoot within that focus range and relies upon
depth-of-field for sharpness. Why not do the same with the
digital and eliminate the time-consuming automatic focus
function?
3) Shoot in aperture preferred mode with the
lens set to wide angle and choose the smallest aperture. This
will increase the inherent depth of field just as it does with
her Leica.
3) Increase the exposure sensitivity. Her
digital camera's default sensitivity is the equivalent of ISO
80. However, it can be set manually to ISO 100, 200 or 400.
Using ISO 400 will provide faster shutter speeds. The higher
sensitivity may result in some noise (grain) just as it does
with film.
4) Shoot in black and white mode. Although
digital cameras record black and white images as three-channel
RGB, less electronic noise is exhibited in the gray scale mode.
The screen shot below shows the blue channels of an RGB color
shot (left) and a grayscale (but still in its RGB mode) on the
right. Note the color noise that shows up in the color version.
All three grayscale channels exhibit the same exact lack of
noise.
RGB vs. Grayscale channels
5) Shoot in "Normal" versus "Fine" quality mode.
Her camera compresses images in JPEG and the Normal mode reads
the image to the memory card about twice as fast as in Fine
mode. I've found it's almost impossible to discern a quality
difference in comparing images from the two modes. Further, it
doubles the number of exposures available.
6) Extend the period of time before the camera
goes to sleep. In her camera, the default is 30 seconds of
inactivity before the camera shuts down its exposure readiness.
Setting the period to five minutes ensures against losing a shot
because her camera is automatically reawakening.
7) Turn off the LCD monitor and use the
viewfinder to shoot. Precious seconds are lost if the monitor
has to review the last shot made. Leaving the monitor off also
extends battery life.
8) Use NiMH batteries and carry a spare charged
set. Keeping the camera awake for a longer time will decrease
battery life.
My camera has three "user sets" available and
one of these sets is customized to the above settings. I switch
to it whenever I am prowling a location in search of people
shots rather than scenery.
Using this mode, I worked in close to a
percussion band in Edinburgh, Scotland, and noticed the pair of
lovers on the steps of the art museum in the background. Preset
depth-of-field carried the day to help me capture the scene at
the top of this column.
Another technique I use for street shooting is
to employ my camera's swivel LCD monitor and shoot from waist
level, looking down at the camera and not at my subject. Or I
swivel the monitor to an advantageous angle and shoot with only
the lens pointing at the subject. This is the technique used to
capture the five members of a Thai family on their motorbike.
Five Thais on a Bike: Photo by Jim Patterson
After a few weeks my street shooter friend
reported that she was doing much better with her digital camera
although it's "still not quite the same as my M6." But now she's
horrified at the monster size of her Photoshop files. Since
she's a Photoshop neophyte as well, I referred her to my Planet
Photoshop column on resizing and told her about saving her
images as gray scale TIFFs.
The great Henri Cartier-Bresson is famous for
having captured "the decisive moment." Your neighborhood is full
of decisive moments. Capturing them digitally can be easier if
you work to decrease exposure lag. |